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Fast, Faster … oooops. Fastest, eventually.

My IBM broadband cut off first thing this morning, just as I was about to grab my email.

My existing Linksys WAG200G ADSL2+ wireless gateway has been a surprisingly nice router, but isn’t capable of supporting Annex M, which I want to use to double my uplink speed on the Be service. So out it came, and in went a Linksys AG241, which has been reflashed with some custom firmware to allow it to support Annex M. It is actually more configurable than the WAG200G, with a few more routing functions, at the expense of there being no wireless. As my wireless is implemented via separate WAP’s anyway, this is not an issue.

I configured the settings according to the depressingly sparse information that came from Be Unlimited with their “BeBox” router. Needless to say, it didn’t work. After much fiddling, and still no success, I unpacked the BeBox, disconnected the rest of my network, and hooked it up. It immediately made a connection to the Internet, which for a moment or two made me think that perhaps I should just go with the flow, and stick with it.

But then I looked at the configuration menus, to work out how to set it up to work with the rest of my system. Or rather I should say the lack of menus. Selective port forwarding? Nope. QoS? Not that I could see. Custom firewall rules? No chance.

Anyway, with the Internet back up it was easy enough to find the mistake I’d made in setting up the AG241 (I’d picked the wrong DSL modulation setting), so I swapped the BeBox back out, put the Linksys back in, changed the DSL modulation, and now my home network is back up and working smoothly again. And the BeBox is back in its box.

Finally, by setting my SNR Margins to 3dB I’m now getting sync speeds of 17,176Kbps down, 2,648kbps up, and running a speed test gave me throughputs of 14,670kbps down, and 2,234kbps up. Which is about 7 times faster than the IBM service. We’ll see how reliable it is with that (relatively) low SNR Margin … if it holds the connection overnight then I’ll stick with it, but if it turns out to be unreliable I can switch it back up to 6dB, and lose only about 10-20% of my throughput. Which is a small sacrifice to have reliability.

2 thoughts on “Fast, Faster … oooops. Fastest, eventually.”

I didn’t; my ISP provides the ability for me to adjust the SNR margins at their end of the connection using their web-based account management. The ag241 then syncs to those margins automatically. I don’t know if you could achieve the same thing with the ag241 shell on its own – I’ve never needed to try that.